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Chris. Hey, my name is Chris Brennan, and you're listening to the Astrology Podcast. In this episode, I'm gonna address some recent headlines in the news that are claiming that your zodiac sign is wrong or your zodiac sign has changed for some reason. And I'm gonna explain why these headlines are actually misleading and not necessarily true. All right, so let's jump right into it. So a month ago, the New York Times published an article that was titled, you, zodiac sign is 2000 years out of Date. And. And the basic premise of the article is just that precession exists. And due to precession, the sidereal and tropical zodiacs have diverged, and therefore Western astrologers are wrong for using the tropical zodiac because it aligns with the seasons rather than the fixed stars and constellations. So while this is presented as a new piece of reporting and some other news outlets sort of picked it up and ran with it, this is actually a really common narrative that it repeated just a few standard talking points that get repeated, especially in the media. Like, every few years, this story kind of goes viral where somebody will write an article about it, and then somebody in the press will pick it up, and then it'll go viral, and everybody will be talking for a few weeks about how your zodiac signs have changed or how your zodiac sign is wrong and other things like that. So in my career as an astrologer, I have seen this happen multiple times. So there was a big time. This happened in 2011, where the media was talking about it for weeks, and it was in Time magazine and all these other major media outlets. It also happened again in 2016. It happened again in 2020, and there's different variations of it at different points. For example, I think the 2016 one. The claim which was originally put on some anonymous blog, was that NASA has changed the zodiac signs. So that was the little unique spin on it at the time was that it was being claimed that NASA made this change when NASA did nothing of the sort, or other times, there's just other little variations. But it always comes down to a few main talking points that are always repeated. And these talking points are, one, about precession, two, about the tropical and sidereal zodiacs and the fact that they're no longer aligned. Three, about the constellations being unequal in size. Four, about the constellation Ophiuchus. But then, five, the final point that always comes back to is they emphasize that there's nothing to astrology and that it's not scientific and there's no reason to believe in it. In the first place. And therein lies the fundamental problem with most of these articles, and indeed with the one that was published last month, is that they usually are presented as if they're trying to clue the audience in on something important, that their zodiac sign has changed. And therefore, they're kind of targeting people that already believe that astrology is a legitimate phenomenon and who resonate with their zodiac sign or zodiac signs in some way. And then they're trying to convince those people, though, that what they believed is actually mistaken. And the entire point of this, unfortunately, though, is not actually to genuinely educate or clue people in on something, necessarily, but the purpose primarily is rhetorical in that it's meant to kind of misdirect people and to undermine people's belief that astrology might be a legitimate phenomenon by introducing doubt about it and introducing confusion fundamentally. So while there are legitimate issues underlying things that need to be discussed and that everybody, as soon as they start studying astrology, learns some of these basic concepts and some of these basic distinctions within the astrological community about precession or sidereal versus tropical or what have you, the issue underlying this is that it has more to do, I believe, with a rhetorical strategy that's meant to. To get people to stop looking into astrology and taking it seriously, fundamentally by introducing doubt about the subject and confusion. And that's one of my primary issues with this, not just as an astrologer, but also as a historian of astrology, because the historical explanations and sort of timeline that's given is often mistaken and misleading and doesn't really tell you the full picture about how astrology developed and why astrologers started using the tropical zodiac in the first place, or indeed, why they continued to use the tropical zodiac deliberately and consistently over the past 2,000 years. So that is part of what I would like to talk about today in order to get into some of that history and sort of set the record straight. All right, so why don't we start first with the zodiac and the issue of the three zodiacs, because this is important to understand. And one of the things I want to do is explain to other astrologers the full history behind things. I want to explain this to people that are interested in astrology and also even to people that are skeptical about astrology, so that they can stop making really bad arguments based on misleading people rather than genuinely trying to inform. So the zodiac was first developed, especially by tracking the movement of the moon and the planets, which look like wandering stars in the sky as they would move against the backdrop of the other stars in the sky that are fixed and don't move. So basically, if you go out over a successive number of nights over a long period of time, and look at the fixed stars each night, you'll see some stars that always stay in the same place, but over time, you'll see some little stars that actually move against the other stars. And what they realized eventually is that the stars that move were the planets. And that's actually what the Greek word planetes meant originally, was wandering star or moving star. So originally, the Babylonians or the Mesopotamian astronomers and astrologers identified different constellations and different groupings of fixed stars that formed different patterns in the night sky. There was a number of different constellations that they identified of unequal size that the planets and the moon and the sun would move through over the course of different periods of time. This is what is known as the constellational zodiac, which is a zodiac that is just the path that the sun and moon and the other planets move through over a period of time. Because it turns out that the planets and the sun and moon, they don't actually deviate from this very specific path through the sky, but instead there's a specific path that they always move through. And that path is what we call the zodiac, or that's part of the definition of the zodiac in the ecliptic, which is that it's the path that the planets move through in the sky and don't deviate from. So when you're just defining it like that, the constellational zodiac is just whatever parts of different constellations the planets move through as they move through the path known as the ecliptic. And there were at least 17 or more different constellations or like parts of constellations that the planets would move through over the course of their different planetary periods. Eventually, by the 5th century BCE, the Mesopotamians standardized the zodiac signs to consist of 12 signs of exactly 30 degrees each. So this all happened in this really important period of time around the 5th century, because around the 5th century, they started producing ephemerides, which were like tables or books of planetary positions. The concept of natal astrology was introduced around this time, around the 5th century BC, which is the premise that the alignment of the planets at the moment that you're born or the day that you were born has something significant to say about your life and your future. And then the zodiac was also standardized at this point to be 12 signs of 30 degree each. So right away, by standardizing the zodiac, it's partially bringing it into alignment with the Mesopotamian calendar, and it starts to become an abstract division of 12 segments of the sky, fundamentally, rather than something that is fully aligned with the constellations, because one of the issues with the constellational zodiac is that the constellations are unequal in size. So there's some constellations, like Virgo, that are very big, and there's other constellations, like Cancer, for example, that are much smaller. So already, once you go from the constellational zodiac to the sidereal zodiac, that's 12 signs of exactly 30 degrees each, you're starting to create a construct that has more symbolic significance, rather than something that's purely being based on mapping things to the stars exactly one for one. And it's also moving in the direction of being aligned partially with the seasons and the different seasons that happen, especially in the Northern hemisphere, like spring, summer, autumn, and winter. So this is really important because all of these things come together around the 5th century BCE as basic concepts of standardizing the zodiac and introducing the concept of natal astrology, that there's something about the alignment of the planets that's significant at the moment of birth. What happens after that, though, is over the course of the next few centuries, astrology continues to develop and get more advanced and get more complex until eventually, sometime around the second century, there is this synthesis occurs in Egypt, and it's in Hellenistic Egypt, which is basically Egypt after it was taken over by the Greeks or the Macedonians by Alexander the Great. And we have the creation of things like the Library of Alexandria around the third century bce. And in Alexandria, we have this synthesis of a bunch of different astrological traditions. You get the astrology of Mesopotamia, you get the astrology of Egypt starting to merge or mix together with the Mesopotamian tradition. You also get some concepts from Greek philosophy and geometry and mathematics starting to be blended in. And it creates this really interesting system in the Hellenistic period that emerges after the second century BCE that we call Hellenistic astrology. And for all intents and purposes, Hellenistic astrology acts as the foundation of all of Western astrology over the past 2,000 years, that all of the different subsequent traditions of astrology, especially in the west, have been different variations of the basic system that was created around the 2nd century BCE in Hellenistic Egypt. And that system largely focuses on natal astrology and birth charts. And. And it has four distinct parts, which is the planets, the signs of the zodiac, the concept of aspects or configurations, and finally the concept of the 12 houses. So all of these concepts are put together and standardized into a specific construct or system. And this is actually what I wrote an entire book about, it's titled Hellenistic the Study of Fate and Flight Fortune. Because part of the thesis of my book is that Hellenistic astrology was created as a technical construct for interpreting fate and for being able to view and actually discuss and articulate a person's personal fate through the lens of their birth chart. So what's important about this is that most of the system of Western astrology develops around this time, around the 2nd century BCE. And although it's taking some concepts from the earlier Mesopotamian and Egyptian and other astrological traditions, fundamentally there are some new concepts that are being introduced at this time as well. So one of the concepts that seems to have been introduced around this time is the concept of the so called domicile scheme of assigning each of the seven traditional planets to one or two of the signs of the zodiac. For example, the sun and the Moon were assigned to Cancer in Leo because those are the two signs that follow after the summer solstice, which is the hottest and the brightest part of the year in the Northern hemisphere. So you assign the two luminaries are the two planets that provide light and in the case of the sun, heat. So there's a symbolic resonance there and a motivation for assigning the two luminaries to those two signs, the Zodiac. After that, you assign Mercury to the two signs that are flanking the sun and the Moon, which are Virgo and Virgo and Gemini. Then after that you move on to the next planet that is the furthest from that moving outwards after Mercury, which is Venus, which gets assigned to Libra and to Taurus. Then the next furthest and slowest planet is Mars, so it gets assigned to Scorpio and Aries. Then Jupiter is the next furthest planet that gets assigned to Sagittarius and Pisces. And finally, Saturn is the last visible traditional planet in ancient times, and it gets assigned to Capricorn and Aquarius. So what's important about this scheme that's crucial for our understanding is that this scheme one becomes part of the motivation for why astrologers associate certain things with certain zodiac signs. So part of the reason, for example, Leo is said to signifies some of the things that it signifies is because it's associated with the sun. Or part of the reason that the sign Cancer is associated with certain things is because it's associated with the Moon. So astrologers over the past 2000 years have used this schematic, this scheme or this construct as part of the theoretical motivation to generate some of the meanings of the zodiac. Signs. So that's point one. Point two that's important to understand is because the astrologers assigned the sun and the Moon to Cancer and Leo, because those two zodiac signs in the tropical zodiac coincide with the hottest and brightest part of the year. That means part of the motivation was seasonal considerations, that they were being motivated to assign the planets to the signs of the zodiac based on the seasons that those signs were thought to coincide with in the Northern Hemisphere. So this is what leads us to the tropical zodiac. The constellational zodiac was based on the uneven constellations. The sidereal zodiac was based on standardizing those unequal constellations into 12 signs of 30 degrees each. And then the tropical zodiac is the next phase in that, which is that it takes the seasons and specifically the two solstices and the two equinoxes, which is the summer solstice, which is the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, and the winter solstice, which is the shortest day of the year. And then it takes the spring equinox and the fall equinox, and it uses those as the starting points for the four cardinal zodiac signs. In particular, for example, the first degree of the sign Aries becomes the first day of spring, basically, which is the virtual equinox, becomes the first sign of Aries. And then the zodiac signs are measured out from that in three 30 degree increments, so that they end up aligning very closely with the seasons. They end up aligning perfectly with the seasons and with these different periods of light and heat that are experienced in the Northern Hemisphere. So the tropical zodiac then becomes focused on these concepts of light and heat and specifically the seasons, rather than connecting it with the constellations. So why that's important for our purposes is when Hellenistic astrology was being put together, and therefore, for all intents and purposes, when Western astrology was being put together around the second century bce, the astrologers, when they were looking at the zodiac signs, the seasons and the tropical zodiac signs were roughly aligned with the constellations and the sidereal zodiac signs. And this is important because it turns out that the astrologers were drawing elements from both in terms of some of their interpretations of the signs of the zodiac and what they meant. So, for example, I've already talked about how the concept of the domicile, rulership, or the planets being associated with zodiac signs draws on seasonal components, which would make it more based on the tropical zodiac, whereas there's additional components, such as the idea of the quadruplicities or modalities, which describes some qualities that astrologers associate with the zodiac signs, such as cardinal, fixed and mutable. And the way that these are described in the ancient astrological texts by astrologers like Ptolemy is that it has to do with the part of the season that that sign of the zodiac falls in. So, for example, Aries, the sign Aries and the cardinal signs are associated with initiating new things because they fall towards the beginning of a new season, where there's a sudden shift in the temperature and the air and the levels of heat and light and different things like that or Taurus, for example. And the other fixed signs are associated with stability symbolically because they fall in the middle of the seasons when things have settled down and the season itself has become relatively stable in whatever the nature of that season is, whether it's like the middle of spring, the middle of summer, the middle of autumn, or the middle of winter. So that's the fixed signs. And then finally you have the mutable signs, which are associated with changeability, because towards the end of the seasons, you move from the fixed stability of the fixed signs, basically, and you start the transition and sort of previewing moving into the next season as you move into the next cardinal sign. So as a result of that, mutable signs are associated with mutability and changeability and transition. So those considerations then are being drawn from the seasons which match up with the tropical zodiac. And there's other concepts, such as the exaltation signs, which also recently, some historical evidence has shown were also derived ultimately from considerations that were more connected with the seasons rather than the stars. So, on the one hand, the astrologers in the Hellenistic tradition are drawing concepts from the tropical zodiac and from the seasons, but then they're also sometimes drawing some concepts from the fixed stars. So, for example, a paper was published recently that demonstrated that the degrees of exaltation were taken from specific fixed stars. And occasionally in certain texts, like Vettius Valens, while he'll sometimes draw on tropical considerations, he'll also talk about sometimes certain fixed stars that are in certain signs of the zodiac. As a result of that, in the Hellenistic period, for the most part, the two zodiacs were aligned. Astrologers were drawing on elements of both. And for the most part, most astrologers don't actually seem to have been aware of precession, because it was a relatively new scientific concept that hadn't been widely acknowledged at that point. But all of that was to change because going back to the second century bce, there was a famous astronomer named Hipparchus, a Greek astronomer, who discovered Precession, and who discovered that fundamentally the tropical signs of the zodiac were drifting away from the sidereal zodiac signs of the zodiac. And he thought it was happening at a rate of about one degree every hundred years, which is not too far off from what we know today, which is that that drift happens about one degree every 72 years. So that drift between the tropical and sidereal zodiac is what we know of as precession, which is just the rate at which the tropical zodiac of the seasons slowly moves out of alignment with the sidereal zodiac of the constellations. So in ancient times, this wasn't widely known about yet, and it's only by the time we see possible references to it by astrologers such as Thrasyllus in the first century ce. But really, it seems like Ptolemy is one of the main astrologers, because he was also an astronomer in the 2nd century in Egypt who both recognized precession, because he was able to do his own observations, which confirmed the observations that Hipparchus had made a few centuries earlier in the second century bce. So basically, Ptolemy was able to confirm precession, and then by that point he also had to make a choice, or you realized that you had to make a choice then when you were doing astrology in terms of whether you were going to use the sidereal zodiac or the tropical zodiac as a result of this issue and this slow moving out of alignment of the two zodiacs. So in Ptolemy's work, to make a long story short, for the purpose of astrology, Ptolemy adopted the the tropical zodiac associated with the seasons, because he thought that that was conceptually what most of the meanings of the zodiac signs were based on. And he also believed that to be the intention of the earlier founders of Hellenistic astrology, going back to the second century bce. And that's due to the concepts of. I explained earlier why the domicile scheme seems to be tied in with the seasons, because the starting point is associating it with the two brightest parts of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, which is the beginning of the summer season. Or the rationale that I explained earlier about the modalities or the quadruplicities and how those are tied into the three different parts of the seasons. He also had a rationale for the exaltations that was tied in with seasonal components as well. So part of the important point here that people need to understand is that one of the most famous and influential astrologers of all time, Claudius Ptolemy in the second century, recognized that this was an issue that the zodiacs were drifting out of alignment. And he made a deliberate choice to define the zodiac based on the tropical signs in accordance with the seasons rather than the sidereal constellations, because he thought the primary motivation underlying what astrologers had been doing for centuries at that point was more closely in alignment with the tropical zodiac. And I believe he was right. I mean, I think that can be demonstrated based on some of the things that I was explaining earlier. So this is really important because it means that astrologers have been aware of precession for 2000 years now, that astrologers, at least starting with Ptolemy, if not earlier, started making a conscious choice once the reality of precession became known, that astrologers, at least as early as Ptolemy, started making the choice to deliberately use the tropical zodiac, and that this wasn't like an accidental thing, that this was like a deliberate choice that was being done of their own personal volition, based on what they thought made the most conceptual sense, based on the different motivations of the astrological techniques. So one of the things that Ptolemy didand this is where the crux of the issue falls primarily, which is that Ptolemy said he was gonna use the tropical signs of the zodiac, but that he was gonna continue to use the conventional names of the zodiac signs that were in use up to that point and apply them to these tropical divisions of like 12 signs of 30 degrees each. So as a result of that, so Scorpio, for example, which was previously a constellation and then a sidereal zodiac sign, was then applied to this 30 degree division that's associated with the middle of the autumn season in the tropical zodiac, or Aries, for example, which is the 30 degrees after the spring equinox, would be called Aries in the tropical zodiac, sort of adopting and continuing the name from Aries, the constellation, and this is wherein there is a bit of an issue in terms of naming conventions, because I think at this point, for example, if Ptolemy or other astrologers had adopted completely different names or had modified the names in some way, then maybe there wouldn't be an issue of confusion in the future where the astrologers are using the names from the constellations, but they're applying them to divisions based on the seasons, then maybe you wouldn't have some of this confusion about what's being done in modern times. But that's just a naming convention issue. And it's something that when people learn about astrology, you get over pretty quickly and you figure out pretty quickly. And one of the reasons that Ptolemy adopted that, and I don't think it was fully a mistake is because of the belief that the qualities that astrologers had been assigning to those signs of The Zodiac, those 1230 degree divisions, were based on seasonal components. So I don't think he necessarily thought that that was super misleading or mistaken to continue using those names, because the names of those divisions and what they were thought to represent were firmly rooted in the conceptual framework that he was going to continue at that point. But it comes down to a naming convention issue at that point from the second century forward. All right, so Ptolemy adopts the tropical zodiac. Ptolemy writes, not just. He writes a book on astronomy as well as a book on astrology. And both of these books became two of the most influential books on astronomy and astrology ever in the history of either of those arts or sciences. And Ptolemy's astronomical models and the construct that he created for understanding planetary movements became the dominant model for over a thousand years, at that point, for many centuries. And as a result of the dominance of Ptolemy's astronomical models, this also made some of his astrological work more popular as well and very influential. So that's like part of the case. I mean, Ptolemy's astrological work also itself was very well done and very well put together in terms of the synthesis that he created. So it had its own internal merits in terms of why it was very popular and influential after that point. But historically, you do have to understand the interrelationship between Ptolemy's status as an astronomer and his status as an astrologer. Ptolemy sets that new standard. One of the things he also does is he publishes tables, or a more simple method of calculating tables of planetary positions called the handy tables. And this allowed astrologers to calculate birth charts and astrological positions more quickly and more easily and more accurately than they had been able to do up to that point. So then Ptolemy's system basically becomes wildly popular and becomes kind of like the standard. And this helps to sort of cement the Western astrological tradition on this track of using the tropical zodiac rather than the sidereal zodiac, due to that combination of different factors surrounding the figure of Ptolemy. As a quick historical aside, it's worth mentioning at this point, While on the one hand, the Western astrological tradition was going in this direction of the tropical zodiac, partially due to Ptolemy and due to its own internal considerations around the same time. Historians believe that there were some texts on Greek astrology, on Hellenistic astrology, that were translated into Sanskrit around this time, and that these texts influenced the development of the Indian astrological tradition and is part of the Reason why, if you go back in time and you compare Hellenistic astrology, like ancient Western astrology, to ancient or even contemporary Indian astrology, you'll see a lot of overlaps and a lot of similarities between those two traditions and a lot of things that the two are doing the same, basically because there were some cultural interactions at that time due to trade and due to other things like that. So the Indian astrologers, to make a long story short, had an earlier tradition of astrology where the indigenous astrology of India is rooted in a system known as the Nakshatras, which is a system of lunar mansions based on the moon. And it's essentially like a lunar zodiac that consists of 27 or 28 signs. And each of those 27 or 28 signs is tied in with a specific fixed star, so that it's very much rooted in a sidereal framework of looking at the stars and the constellations and the asterisms, which are like clusters of stars. So there was that earlier tradition of using the Nakshatras and tying those into fixed stars. And then the Indian astrologers had this influx of this other form of astrology that was based on the zodiac and that was based on dividing the sky into these 1230 degree segments. And I think that the Indian astrologers could have gone either way in terms of adopting the tropical zodiac, like Ptolemy did, or adopting the sidereal zodiac, which was used earlier in the Hellenistic tradition and in the late Babylonian or Mesopotamian tradition. I think they could have gone either way in the same way that Ptolemy did. However, there was a strong cultural reason for the zodiac to remain sidereal in India because of the prior use of the Nakshatras, which were tied in with those specific fixed stars, and the way that the Nakshatras then can integrate with the zodiac signs. And I think that provided an additional piece of motivation for the Indian astrologers to keep the sidereal zodiac rather than adopting a tropical zodiac, because then it would have fallen out of alignment more easily with the Nakshatras. So, as a side note, that's the historical piece in terms of the Indian tradition. And then the Indian tradition to this day continues to use, for the most part, the sidereal zodiac, which is the 12 idealized signs connected with the constellations. Whereas the Western tradition, from the second century forward, roughly the same time period, moved and used the tropical zodiac from that point forward, from about the second century BCE, so almost like 2,000 years ago. So historically, that's how things came about. And the important point to bring up at this point, now that we've kind of established the three zodiacs, which is the constellational zodiac, the sidereal zodiac and the tropical zodiac is astrologers then from the second century forward have been using the tropical zodiac deliberately. And this includes a succession of different famous astronomers like Kepler, Galileo, Copernicus, Just a succession of different famous astronomers in Western history were also astrologers and also used the tropical zodiac as their primary reference system for doing astrological calculations. And so what's important about that is it means that you had people that were very highly trained and educated in the sciences of their time period and who were aware of precession and aware of the distinction between the sidereal and the tropical zodiac. And yet they still chose to use the tropical zodiac for their astrological calculations and for their predictions. And they were not doing this just like sort of willy nilly. And one of the things that's annoying about the Times article is they attempt to downplay the belief in astronomy, in astrology among some of the famous astronomers and to just play it off as they were just doing astrology for money or doing it as a side project or something like that, which is a common cope basically that contemporary scientific skeptical types or sometimes astronomers have. To try to downplay the belief in and practice of astrology amongst famous astronomers of the past is just to try to pretend that they weren't that into it or they were just doing it to make money or something like that, which isn't really true. What's important to understand is that these astronomers and astrologers historically over the past 2,000 years, were sometimes doing astrology in a very high stakes environment and in a very intense environment where sometimes they were doing consultations for, for kings and queens and powerful people, sometimes they were issuing predictions about world affairs that were very weighty. Like William Lilly, for example, was issuing predictions during the middle of the English Civil War, or you had Guido Bonatti or Theophilus of Edessa, or different astrologers that were advising kings on military campaigns about the best time to initiate battles or other things like that. So you have astrologers that are practicing astrology in a high stakes environment. They are aware of the difference between the sidereal and the tropical zodiac, but they're deliberately choosing to use the tropical zodiac because they believe that that is the most effective system for what they're trying to accomplish using their system of astrology. And in terms of making predictions that they believe to be valid based on that system. And that's really important and really Crucial. And that often gets left out of this entire discussion, where this is sort of just like summarized as if astrologers made a mistake and they don't know that the tropical and sidereal zodiac is. Have drifted and that it's all a big misunderstanding. But now this has been discovered recently, even though procession's been known about for 2,000 years. And now we're gonna correct it by letting you know that your zodiac sign is one sign off. So it's like when you actually study the history of astrology and you realize the long history and traditions of just like generations and generations of astrologers and astronomers that have used this approach over the past 2,000 years, you realize how weird these headlines are. Every few years, you see these headlines saying zodiac signs have changed. Turns out astrologers were wrong all along in a misleading attempt to try to dupe the public. Basically, ironically, when you look at the history, you realize not just how baseless that is, but how offensive it is to the generations and generations of intelligent people who were making a deliberate decision to use the tropical zodiac. And I think that's one of the things I wanted to convey today is just not just the length to which astrologers have been using this for 2000 years, but the deliberateness and that there's a long tradition of very smart people that have been doing that deliberately based on not just the conceptual and philosophical motivations for that, but also because they believe that that is the most effective system for astrological interpretations and predictions. And that means something. I mean, that means something to me, obviously, not just as a historian, but also as an astrologer in terms of getting it right when you're talking about this complex issue and this history, that it's important to frame things in an accurate way historically. All right, so to bring this around, I just wanted to conclude this again by bringing it around to the baselessness of some of the skeptical attacks on tropical astrology, which is one, that there was a recent shift that has caused everyone's zodiac sign to be one sign off. No, that's not true in the sense that if Western astrologers have been deliberately defining the tropical zodiac in the context of the seasons for 2000 years. And if everybody in the west has grown up, say, resonating with their zodiac signs as defined by Western astrologers, the seasons don't change. The seasons haven't changed, and therefore the tropical signs of the zodiac have not changed because that is a fixed reference system relative to the seasons. So it's misleading to say that everyone's sign is one sign off. This also brings up adjacent things like there's the claim about Ophiuchus and that Ophiuchus should be the 13th sign. But the problem with that is that if western astrologers are not basing their zodiac off the constellations, but instead they're defining it as 1230 degree divisions that fall into alignment with the equinoxes and the solstices, then Ophiuchus doesn't really come into that in terms of changing the zodiac signs for that reason, because we're not basing it off of the constellations in the first place. So while Ophiuchus could be taken into account in terms of that, Western astrologers do actually pay attention to fixed stars or sometimes specialize in the placement of certain fixed stars and where they fall within the tropical signs of the zodiac. That's kind of like a separate thing. And it doesn't change the fundamental definition of using 12 signs of 30 degrees each. I think I've been able then to summarize this long and kind of complex history, and I want to bring it back around to what the point is of articles like this, where as I said in the beginning, because the ultimate conclusion of any article like this is ultimately they say astrology is baseless and you shouldn't believe in it anyways. And that's really the point of the article. And that's one of the things that comes off as a little bit misleading and almost nefarious about it, is if you think about it and you boil it down, these articles are always written by somebody who doesn't believe that astrology is a legitimate phenomenon. But then they're telling people who do believe that astrology is a legitimate phenomenon how they should practice or think about astrology. So they're saying you should use the sidereal zodiac rather than the tropical zodiac, or they're saying you should use the constellational zodiac rather than the tropical zodiac. But the problem with that is that these people ultimately don't actually believe in astrology. They don't practice it, they don't think it's legitimate phenomenon. And ultimately their goal is not to necessarily help people have a better understanding of their zodiac sign in the sense that they actually care for what sign each person associates with their life. But rather their purpose is just to attempt through an indirect manner to convince people that astrology is wrong. So when they say that your zodiac sign is out of date or your zodiac sign is wrong, what they're really actually trying to say is just astrology is wrong, and they're trying to convince people of this through a roundabout method. And what's funny about this though, is that a lot of people don't get that that's actually fundamentally what's going on here. And, and so that's why you'll see the secondary reporting on this. I watched a little clip from the Today show that was sort of doing secondary reporting about the New York Times article. And their entire thrust of it was your zodiac sign has changed and it's one sign off. So if you previously thought that you were Sagittarius, now you're a Scorpio. And they went through all three or four, four of the people that were sitting on the panel and explained how their sun sign was this, but now that means that it's this. So that people take the reporting at face value and that they think that the purpose of it is actually to help them figure out their correct or their true zodiac sign. But ultimately that's not the point of the reporting. The point of the reporting recording is just to mess with astrologers, to introduce doubt into astrology, to get people to question it and to reject it ultimately, because let's be real, it's fine and it's healthy. If people question astrology and question their beliefs, whatever their beliefs are, we all need to have a healthy sense of skepticism about what we believe in and truly knowing why we believe what we believe. And I do think that's important now more than ever, especially with all of the fake news reporting and AI things that are happening and all the other bizarre, terrible, even anti science things in the world. I understand from that perspective the motivation sometimes of science writers and skeptics and other people like that who are trying to fight what seems like a never ending battle or a losing battle, frankly at this point, against really harmful concepts in society that are not based on science or not based on reality, I guess we should say. And they see astrology as one element of that or one manifestation of a larger problem and something that they have to fight and that they have to try to convince people is not true or is not correct. So I understand on the one hand, the motivation for that and where that comes from, and that ultimately I think a reasonable and noble fight to try to promote science at this point in time and this point in history and understand that there's actually a good reason for it and a good motivation for it, but I do think that it is nonetheless the way that it's done is often misleading and is not accurate and it bothers me that in an attempt to defend the scientific worldview and to attempt a defense of reality and basing our beliefs on things that are actually happening in nature and in reality, that you would have to use a misleading argument in order to make that case, which leaves out major things about why astrologers do what they do, the deliberateness of it, and the defendable parts of that. It makes me uncomfortable then, that a misleading argument has to be made in order to promote science. And there is an underlying issue with that that needs to be reconciled and dealt with and recognized, because I don't think it's being adequately recognized at this point when the same arguments are just continually trotted out, like every few years. All right, so there is an underlying issue about, within the astrological community, that astrology is a conversation that astrologers themselves can have about the different merits between the three zodiacs as reference systems of like, should you use the constellational zodiac, should you use the sidereal zodiac, should you use the tropical zodiac? And I think it's important for astrologers to have those internal debates, because every field has debates like that of technique and practice and what works better, what makes more sense conceptually or philosophically or what have you. Those are all fine debates to have. And there's sort of a separate discussion that we could have maybe I've had actually in other episodes, talking about different astrologers from different traditions, like representing the tropical versus the sidereal zodiac, and what their arguments are for taking one position or the other. But to me, that's sort of like a separate aside where the primary point of this video is. I just wanted to talk about and explain some of the issues underlying some of the arguments that have been made so that astrologers themselves are better informed and better able to respond to criticisms like this or attempts to mislead people and know how to respond to them, especially when it comes to some of the history, which I know can be very complicated and outside of people's field of specialty, to really be able to talk about that. So I wanted to respond because this is something that I've studied and written about extensively due to my interest in going back and studying the history of astrology and understanding why astrologers do what they do and how they came to do it has been a major part of my life's work. And I think that that's been valuable because then in instances like this where we have these issues that arise, you can actually know the texts that people are talking about, know the history, and you can be able to identify when somebody's making an argument that doesn't actually make sense in terms of the history. And this is one of those cases. So I hope this has helped to clear some things up for people in terms of the three zodiacs, in terms of the history of that. If you have any questions, then please let me know and post them in the comments below. This video on YouTube especially. Especially. Maybe I'll do a Q and A at some point to answer some questions and just see what people think. 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